Similarities

 I have heard of the show, and there were posters and souvenirs about it all over Northern Ireland, but i don't really know it.

The humor is a little overobvious here, but it's still fun.

 

The Voting Dead

 

Jonathan Adler over at Volokh links to the Ohio report about how many of the dead are still on the voting rolls there. From the comments:

Bob Lipton says:
As a native son of New York City, I find this distrust of the dead to be bigoted and unwarranted. The dead have formed an important voting bloc in New York City and other urban centers for decades. To deprive someone of the the franchise just because he happens to reside in a graveyard instead of an apartment building smacks of an attempted to deprive the majority of control of the government in favor of a small minority, which is clearly undemocratic. It merely favors those who show up at other events.

The dead make little demand on the state. Through specially and perhaps unconstitutionally onerous ‘death taxes’ and ‘estate taxes’ they bear a disproportionate proportion of the burden on the common wealth. They use no public hospitals, draw no pensions, commit no known crimes and have tiny carbon footprints.

Yet despite these marks of good citizenship and, perhaps, oppression, there is a movement about to deprive them of the franchise, spearheaded, no doubt, by the minority of Americans who see them as impediments to their own private goals and who like to show up at camera-covered events to protest the more quiescent fellow Americans.

Perhaps the Necro-American communities scattered throughout this fair land of ours are insufficiently politically active for their own good, but they are, on average, older than the living, less physically able and they doubtless consider it less dignified to be out and about, engaging in unbecoming picketing and shout, preferring to let their voting make their political choices clear for them.

Whatever their privately held reasons are — and who can blame them for not making those reasons public in this modern climate of yellow journalism — we should, as good Americans, support their wishes to remain private individuals without giving up those rights, privileges and duties that we all hold dear, among them the franchise. After all, it is all too likely that many of the people reading this will some day join a Necro-American community, and who among us would wish to lose our vote?

I am told that they should be referred to as "Vitally Challenged" or "Otherly Animate" these days. 

And in seriousness, GKC thought that tradition is the way we give our ancestors a vote.

Two From Aporia

Aporia has a marketing strategy of teasing you with an enticing-sounding bit of research, then giving you two or three different ones with the sexy one behind the paywall.  I can't fault them too much, as the ones they give for free are usually pretty good.

So the Come-On is Do Neurotic People Always Lean Left? Upgrade to paid to find out.

The first article you can actually get to is "Genetic Origins of Utilitarian vs Kantian Moral Philosophy."  The second is "Universities With Most Retracted Scientific Articles." Both worth a bit of a look, I thought.

Zach Lowe

I have been waiting over six months for Zach to come back.  Just in time for the last month and the playoffs. 

BTW this has been my most posts ever in a month by a good margin.  I should fast from the news more often, eh?  This month has been almost half of my full total for 2014.
 

The Moral Economy of Guilt.

 From First Things in 2011.  I concur.  Mercy cannot exist without justice. One guilt and proper consequence have been established, then we can be merciful. Yet without that there is only license. A judge can halve a sentence or even suspend one, and a governor can pardon one, but if there is no possibility of even declaring guilt, why have a court at all? 

Related, perhaps, is that the law has to exist to protect the criminal.  The mob is notoriously dangerous and unjust. It learns from experience that crafting some sort of agreed-upon regulation is better in the long run. When that happens, it is no longer a mob but a social contract.

Cumbered With Much Serving

 We have all been there, Martha.  We have all been there. Sometimes we get a bit snippy.

The Abstract Vs The Paper

 Sometimes Papers Contain Obvious Lies by Cremieux Recueil* 

The authors of scientific papers often say one thing and find another; they concoct a story around a set of findings that they might not have even made, or which they might have actually even contradicted. This happens surprisingly often, and it’s a very serious issue for a few reasons.

Yeah, I'll bet. I am guilty of being one of those people who reads the abstract and trusts it, skimming the rest of the paper, especially graphs and charts. So I would be one of the easiest to be fooled in this way. Bsking has mentioned a few times followup up on a paper, usually a link in a text, to see exactly what it says, only to find that the linked paper is nearly irrelevant to the claimed result, misleading, or even pointing in the opposite direction.

I had never heard of an Everest Regression, but it is easy to get the concept from the explanation in the article. Cremieux discusses a paper he dissected that claimed that students got lower test scores in rooms with higher ceilings.  He found, sure enough, that they actually got slightly higher scores.

 This paper’s abstract, title, text, and the public remarks to journalists from the authors all implied that was what they found, but their actual result—correctly shown in a table in the paper and reproducible from their code and data—was the complete opposite: higher ceilings were associated with higher test scores! Making a viral hubbub about this managed to get the paper retracted—eventually—but the retraction notice barely mentioned any of the paper’s problems and, instead, said that whatever issues warranted retraction were examples of good ole “honest error.”

But he doesn't confine himself to "gotcha" criticism over odd and unimportant experiments - he never does - but focuses on large issues where legislation and policy hinge on what authorities falsely believe is true.  For example, he went over a paper from Germany which found that the presence of more foreigners in a region did not affect the crime rate.  This is what many people of authority would like to believe, or at least like you to believe, because pretending to reduce crime with the tried-and-untrue methods is politically safer than trying to fix the real problem, which has something to do with (gulp) foreigners. The Everest Regression in action.

 this is just controlling for altitude and declaring Everest is hot, or stating that stadiums make people run fast!

*A particularly good example of the letters in a French word not having anything to do with pronunciation.

Autism Theories

Sometimes I try too hard to give you one-stop shopping on an idea...

 Autism Is Bad by Sebastian Jensen, recommended by Aporia. I dislike the title, but it is clearly in reference to mythbusting the idea that autism is an intellectual advantage that makes geniuses.

Both of these mythical views of autism are wrong: autistic people are not more likely to be right wing and the link between genius and autism is overblown.

I had not heard of "dimensionality" but the concept is discussed in a internal link and took only a little pondering to pick up.  I will not fully define it here in order to encourage you to go on the essay "Autism as a Disorder of Dimensionality," but it has to do with neuronal branching and complexity of brain architecture. And Johnson thinks the intelligence link is quite possible.

Neuronal density is a plausible candidate for the strongest factor underlying both genius and madness: it both drastically reduces canalization (normalcy), allowing the brain to be wired in strange ways and pointed in odd directions, and offers many more parameters — the raw stuff of achievement. This can lead to madness, genius, or both.

Also included is a chart of where various diagnoses are associated along the political spectrum. Spoiler alert: Most cluster around the center on both the social and economic axes. Both essays go into controversial territory, particularly the one at Opentheory.net. Some of it rather took my breath away. "Are you sure you want to go there?" Sometimes I get the feeling that they just don't like autists, and are trying to get back at someone. OTOH, sometimes they seem to defend them too much. All of this in a package of neurological research and solid grounding. 

This links in turn to  'Just Emil Kirkegaard Things ' A theory of Ashkenazi genius: intelligence and mental illness.

Perhaps I should have started with something more reliable: Autism And Intelligence: Much More Than You Wanted To Know by Scott Alexander at ACX (then Star Slate Codex).  I am surprised I have not linked this before.  At least, I can't find it at present. Plenty of theories there as well.

These numbers should be taken with very many grains of salt. First, IQ tests don’t do a great job of measuring autistic people. Their intelligence tends to be more imbalanced than neurotypicals’, so IQ tests (which rely on an assumption that most forms of intelligence are correlated) are less applicable. Second, even if the test itself is good, autistic people may be bad at test-taking for other reasons – for example, they don’t understand the directions, or they’re anxious about the social interaction required to answer an examiner’s quetsions. Third, and most important, there is a strong selection bias in the samples of autistic people. Many definitions of autism center around forms of poor functioning which are correlated with low intelligence. Even if the definition is good, people who function poorly are more likely to seek out (or be coerced into) psychiatric treatment, and so are more likely to be identified.

Fanfare For the Common Man

A half-dozen titles were suggested before Copland settled on this one.  Vice President Henry Wallace wanted the piece to debut just before income tax time in 1943.  Copland replied "I am all for honoring the common man at income tax time."

 

Non-Opioid Painkiller

The FDA approved a non-opioid painkiller. Journavx, developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, targets a protein called the NaV1.8 voltage-gated sodium channel, which transmits pain signals from sensory neurons to the brain. No other drugs on the market target this protein; existing painkillers instead bind to several other different NaV channels at once. In a phase 3 trial with 2,000 patients undergoing surgery, Journavx reduced pain as effectively as hydrocodone plus paracetamol and had fewer side effects. It also does not appear to be addictive. But the drug will cost about $233 per week; opioids cost about $12 per week.  (From Works in Progress)

Ruxandra Teslo and Lyman Stone

I like them both.  They are batting the ball back and forth on substack about fertility, quite respectfully, from what I have seen. Some of the cross-purposes seems to be that Lyman is focused on overall societal fertility and finding interventions that encourage women to have more children, while Ruxandra is focused on women not being punished in the marketplace for having children. She introduced the idea of "greedy" careers: Not that women are greedy for wanting to go into them, but that there are careers such as law and entrepreneurship that are greedy for your time if you want to succeed.

One can see how there would be overlap but disagreement.

My own view is that finding ways for ambitious women to also have children may be a good thing in itself - they are our wives and sisters, after all - but it is not going to change the overall fertility much. I don't see that there has been a cultural shift of women suddenly wanting to imitate Amy Coney Barrett. Therefore, the question becomes how much should a society try to accommodate or compensate each other for differences in biology. The inequality inherent in childbearing, and possibly even -raising, was not set forth in the Constitution or any institutions of humankind. They just is.

DOGE and Chesterton's Fence

Having worked for a government that was nowhere near as wasteful as the Federal Government and seen the problems even there, I have leaned toward approving of DOGE activities even when scare stories are circulated.  I expect that those stories may even be true, and the justification for getting rid of agency A or department B pretty shaky. Yet I also know that we are only hearing one side of the incident, highly dependent on the source. Now more than ever. And the horrified do not seem willing to come to grips with how far the family is already in debt. Yes, a Mercedes is a great investment but...

Yet I also know the wisdom of Chesterton's Fence, not to remove something until we understand why it was put there to begin with. Am I abandoning some of my principles for others, and have I chosen correctly? The first defense for DOGE would be that the field is full of fences, and when we try to evaluate each one cautiously, two more spring up before we are done. 

But still, Chesterton's Fence...

In that spirit, I give you In Defense of Weird Research.

Lord, Show Us A Sign

 

I get what sermon a pastor might draw from a YIELD sign, or a STOP sign.  The addition of the CROSS TRAFFIC part seems a bit more obscure.  Challenge your pastor to derive a sermon from BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE PAVEMENT, or BREAKDOWN LANE TRAVEL ALLOWED 6AM-10AM WEEKDAYS. That's when you know you've got yourself a real first-class preacher.

Vegetables of the Spirit

Galatians 5:22. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

I have heard people make a big deal about this being the fruit of the spirit, not the fruits of the spirit.  This strikes me as a rather fussy distinction without a difference. "No, because the fruit grows out of obedience to the spirit and takes some time, while you can just buy fruits at the market." Hmm, yes. 

Vegetables, now, those are actually different. Isn't it important to have your Vegetables of the Spirit?  Or be a vegetable of the spirit, or something? Inquiring minds want to know.

Mornington Crescent

Well now that you know the rules, here's a really fine multiplayer match.

 

Postmodernist Essays

 You get a different essay generated each time you go.

Mornington Crescent

I believe this was a popular radio game in Britain from the 90s - 10s. The "moves" in this game are stations on the Underground. Most competitions are over in a few minutes. There are a few others on YouTube.

PUA's

From 14 years ago, a longer post on a topic that was new to me then, which resonated with my audience well enough to generate 30 comments. Lots of people I miss there. I don't hear much about the topic anymore.  Maybe I don't hang out at the right joints.  The topic is still interesting, but what I noticed was the quality of the disagreement.  Everyone seemed to partly agree and partly disagree with everyone else, which made for a good discussion.  It is not only that people were polite, but that everyone seemed interested in getting to a good general understanding.  Each believed they had good points to make but were curious about what others had to say. 

I kept trying to expand it to discuss tyrants and political manipulation, but no one nibbled.

Remember that if you comment, none of the comments before mine about the technical minutiae will be read by their original authors. We are starting fresh after that.

*********

Dr. Helen has a link commenting on PUA's - that is "pick up artists." Get used to the acronyms if you choose to read up on this. Either some few with a strong founder effect on the phenomenon of game likes thinking in abbreviations, or this male type in general likes it. The longer article is here is you want to skip directly to that.

The concept is that women's sexual responses can be hacked, using their evolutionary hardwiring against them to seduce them. An idea rather frightening even if only partly true. There is apparently a lot of interest by proponents of what they call game in more academic discussions of what it all means in understanding male-female relationships in general, the future of the human race if knowledge of game becomes more widespread, whether the techniques discussed have wider application for leadership and politics, and, I imagine, a dozen other related items. One reads all this with a sort of horrified fascination.

I don't know the history of this - I recall reading in college that Balzac had claimed that any man could seduce any woman if he would only listen long enough - though I have little doubt that there is much discussion of natural game versus game as an intentional manipulation if one wanted to search for it. And certainly some of the more basic points have been long observed. For example, that women say they want sensitive caring men but go to bed with bad boys has been noted by most high school males. The traditional counters to this, that this only applies to a subset of women and is most prominent in younger women, are acknowledged by some proponents and emphatically denied by others. Questions of what the PUA's ultimately decide they really want in a relationship also take up much discussion space.

I should note that while this sounds like mere braggadocio and hopeful wishing on the part of some men, the proponents have actually amassed evidence that what they claim is in fact true and observable, whether anyone wants it to be true or not. They would claim that it is the disbelief that is mere braggadocio and hopeful wishing on the part of women.

It's hardly surprising that this concept of manipulating others via the use of artificial techniques would emerge from discussions of seduction. But similar things have been claimed about the behavior of tyrannical political groups, cult religions, and sales techniques. Something of these more general applications did show up in Lewis's That Hideous Strength, sounding quite plausible in that context. It may be that we all can be hacked in many ways, and this is simply one aspect, attracting much energy and attention for obvious reasons.

I like to think I would not have used this in high school and college even if I had known. Yet I can't say that with any assurance.

I don't think it is wise to dismiss this as impossible simply because we can invent arguments why it shouldn't be true. That the wilder claims are unlikely doesn't mean that there's not something to it.

Airport

From February 2011.  Chris is still above the Arctic Circle in Norway, now with a fiancee, Maria Reithe. So more than a decade longer than he originally thought, and no indication he will return to America for more than a visit.  He keeps both passports.  We see him every couple of years, plus Facetime.

******** 

When you drop off a son at the international departures terminal, and he's been talking about being based in Norway and Romania for 3-4 years - even though you know this is the son whose plans tend to change more rapidly - you can't help but watch as he goes through the last screening in view and think "Is this the last time I shall ever look at him?"

Perhaps it gets more difficult as it repeats, or maybe I'm just more easily moved to tears as I grow older, but this was harder than sending him off to the Marines, even though statistically, that was far more dangerous.

Trace Bundy

Still My Favorite Guitarist

 

Being Appreciated

The distinction between being appreciated and having status can be smudgy. We can nonetheless imagine low-status people being appreciated by coworkers or neighbors, and high status people who are not appreciated.Yet in general, the two things share a lot of space.

I am retired, and talk to retired people. I know some who have been retired a decade or more but quickly gravitate to telling you how unappreciated they were "by the school," or "in corporate America," or by managers who couldn't tell good workers from bad. The incentives - the promotions and bonuses - encouraged mediocre work instead of great. They are still bitter, and overgeneralise about all of society because of it. I can sense that these beliefs are never going to change now.  There is no pressing need anymore.  They can sink in as deeply as they like.

I did not think myself lucky when I was in jobs where everyone got paid the same, good or bad, or on account of largely irrelevant factors like longevity, degrees earned decades ago with little improvement since, or metrics designed to measure competence in situations unlike the ones they were in. Yet now I see that I was lucky in more important ways.  At least, I see it and partly apprehend it.  When the external was diminished, I had to ask myself "Why am I doing this? What is my motivation to do this well instead of poorly?" Those are more important questions, that those who receive their reward in this world may not get around to answering.

Martin Luther when discouraged would remind himself "I have been baptised, and that is enough." I got that low a few times as well, and now see that this became part of who I am. I do this because that is who I am. Lord make me better.  

Few people are appreciated as much as they deserve, and all of us are eventually forgotten, except a few by accident, like Ötzi. The day comes when we turn toward Aslan or away.

Privilege

The division is America is not between the rich and the poor, or the black and the white and all the others. Nor is it a matter of who is educated and who is not, who is beautiful and who not, nor even who is old and who is young except indirectly.

The greatest division in life is between the sick and the well. Even friends gradually drift away from the sick, who sometimes even embrace the rejection, turtling into their shells. We see this in animals as well, and do this in spite of ourselves. 

Outdoor Boys!

 Luke is back in  Nome again, and we see more of John-Adrian every time. He's on a lot in this one.

A family note is that only my wife and I and our friends in our generation call him John-Adrian.  His brothers call him JA and everyone else just calls him John.  He was Adrian Ionut in Romania, where people are addressed much more often by their middle name. We already had a Jonathan, so we pressured J-A to not just be "John" (as he was already using once he heard he was being adopted), but to hyphenate it.  It ended up making no difference.  So I have two sons named John/Jon. 

Apparently Luke broke JA's augur sometime in this video.  I haven't gotten there yet. I'm still watching the parts where my son is doing heavy labor with his bad back, and I am wincing every time he bends over and lifts.  Some parts of parenting never go away.  I guess he thinks it's worth it.  He turns 40 in a few weeks.  

The rest of the Nichols family shows up at around the 31 minute mark and they go over to the Wyman's for King Crab and other Filipino food by Jocie.  FB is the smallest of her accounts, but it seems to pay well. The middle granddaughter makes an appearance as well. The Nichols are Latter-Day Saints and go to church Sunday.  I hadn't known there was a Mormon church in Nome.  It might be a home church.  Nome has less than 4K people.

Near the end they go looking for Musk Ox. Rough, dangerous creatures.  Jocie gave my wife a winter headband made out of musk ox underfur for Christmas, supposedly the warmest in the world, and Tracy has loved it.

Impressionism

There is a Facebook group "I Love Impressionism," which includes 19th-21st C works.  Lots of Van Gogh and Monet, but also modern artists putting up their own work hoping to catch the eye of people who might like their approach.

 

Affordable Housing

Reclaiming words, that Affordable Housing is not the same as affordable housing.

Voters want housing that’s abundant, high-quality, and affordable (as in inexpensive). But to an elected official or housing bureaucrat, “affordable housing” means housing that’s built under specific government programs, income-restricted, and—in one way or another—subsidized.

 

Automated Driving Is More Difficult In Winter

At the fascinating Substack Changing Lanes Andrew Miller explains why ADS is much more complicated in winter conditions. 

Worst of all, these challenges converge: at precisely the moment when an ADS’s sensors are providing degraded data, its algorithms are struggling to interpret an unfamiliar environment, and it's encountering unexpected behaviors… that is when it needs to make decisions faster than ever. In slippery conditions, as human drivers know, the window for corrective action shrinks dramatically. The need to brake can emerge suddenly, and the response must be both immediate and precisely calibrated to the road conditions.

Yeah, that makes sense. Simply put, ADS has the same problems we do. Sensors providing degraded data? Like eyes. Ears. Everything looks different? Sure does.

 

Henrich

It may be that the newer information is bending me back toward admitting some environmental influence on human behavior beyond incentives and trauma, which I have always acknowledged had good supporting evidence. I was prepared to be grumpy that even Joseph Henrich (The WEIRDest People In The World) has been moved for social reasons to avoid the full genetic understanding because of the nearby toxicity of racial and male/female controversies. That is not what he is arguing, however, and he makes a decent case for an interplay rather than a compromise between the factors. There has always been a trivial observation, that a gene just sitting there on a table doesn't produce any behavior, nor does an environment without an organism. But that is not the same thing as the organism changing the environment which changes the organism.  Sociogenomics describes this as more of a Mobius Strip of co-influence. (More on this below.) I love mathematical analogies and have little defense against their charm.

Pairing this with my recent post on everyone else focusing too much on the worst of the other side's arguments, I see that I have done this with the arguments for environment.  I have spent my energy on annoyance at research that draws conclusions about probable environmental effects when it does not even address some obvious heritable explanations. I try to stay away from the controversies altogether until people are proposing expensive, inconvenient, and ill-thought-out solutions to problems of education. "Research shows that schools with newer textbooks have higher test scores." Um, richer districts have smarter kids to begin with. You have to correct for that with proper controls. "If there wasn't so much stigma about (blank)/ if (blank) students could see more people like themselves/ if we made them all play cooperative games..." It's maddening.

Henrich is talking about a much longer game. Homo sapiens seems to have outcompeted the more individually intelligent Neanderthals with shared cultural knowledge.  We stored the necessary information for survival in each other. This much I knew, albeit only recently. Yet more deeply, there are varieties of collective brain. In very stable environments, the tribe might as well move in the direction of coding ever more information in the genes.  At the other extreme, a more volatile environment requires brains that are better at novel problem solving. No human group has ever been at either extreme - we are talking about gene frequencies in a population, not replacements. The rate of change in an environment changes the gene frequencies over time, push-pull.

The balance between these poles is in cultural/institutional knowledge. These are things the group knows, but may not know why or how they know. He gave an example of ten necessary steps for one tribe's preparation of beans. If you don't get all ten steps right, you increase the chances of cyanide poisoning, quickly or slowly. All of the women and many of the men knew the proper steps. But for a few steps they had no explanation. "This is just the proper way to make beans.  It is our custom." Humans in many places have lost the ability to make bows-and-arrows and not reinvented it for centuries. The technology has been reinvented many times. 

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but tradition, custom, and religion are the mothers of preserving knowledge. Once something is good, changing it almost always makes it worse. This is true even at the physical level, that most mutations are deleterious. Preservation is usually more important.  But in case of invasion, or the mussels or birds suddenly being in short supply, the group has to be willing to try new things, and someone has to think of new things to try. This may drive the development of long-term memory or longevity beyond prime fertility as well, that someone recalls rather than invents a new idea.

Or...it may drive the ability to sing songs and tell stories and develop ceremonies to hold the collective wisdom in condensed, shared form. 

Increased pathogen load depresses intelligence in the individual, but probably not potential intelligence even on a long time scale. Reducing pathogen load depends on innovation, but far more on custom and tradition. Not only can one learn more when young, one can live longer to pass knowledge of berries, or spoor, or weather along to the others. The ceiling may be little changed. 

As I was absorbing this, the NYT had an article on sociogenomics that touched on these matters on much shorter and individual time scales.  I pass this along a bit more reluctantly. Two bits of information contained in it I have seen refuted.  I don't know enough to discern whether it is Conley or his opposition is right, so I won't enter in to an argument that is over my head. But the suspicion caused me to look at other pieces more skeptically, wondering "But couldn't that also be explained by...?" Network effects are tricky, because sample sizes are often too small for confidence. It's a good article nonetheless and valuable even if flawed.

More Drowning Children

Let's not say that it's fun to talk about drowning children, but reading Scott Alexander reason his way through the philosophical experiment is fun. More Drowning Children. 

 TracingWoodgrains draws off a now-deleted essay by Jaibot which talks about the “Copenhagen interpretation of ethics”. It argues that by “touching” a situation - a vague term having something to do with causal entanglement - you gain moral obligation for it. If you can simply avoid touching it, your moral obligation goes away.

I think this explains half the problem, but I can think of another half that it doesn’t explain. Consider:

The problem is based on the The Drowning Child thought experiment of Peter Singer. 

*******

It occurs to me that I have a new pattern of finding articles that look interesting or provoking, including a teaser quote, and making a short observation of my own about it. When I am back on the news (unless I follow CS Lewis and abandon it for good), I may go back to doing less of it.  I also don't think I can go the next step to the Maggie's Farm form of linking to ten stories a day with almost no commentary.  But it feels comfortable for now.

Misophonia

Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity by Scott Alexander at ACX

Misophonia is a condition in which people can’t tolerate certain noises (classically chewing). Nobody loves chewing noises, but misophoniacs go above and beyond, sometimes ending relationships, shutting themselves indoors, or even deliberately trying to deafen themselves in an attempt to escape.

So it’s a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There’s increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake, but which didn’t make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems.

Misophoniacs who go deaf report that it doesn’t go away.

I immediately wondered if there was going to be an overlap with autism, and several people in the comments had examples from their own experience that this is so. As I have suggested before, connections between obsessive-compulsive disorder or personality, autism, schizoid personality disorder, a wide range of sensory and vestibular issues and Lord knows what else are going to be repeatedly rethought and rejiggered over the next decades, rather like a kaleidoscope. 

A lot of these are things we always thought of as "just a quirk," with no particular meaning, such as "my mother always complained that we chewed too loudly no matter how quiet we tried to be.  I'm still self-conscious about it." Yet one result of greater and greater communication, especially with the rise of search engines, is that we find patterns. 

But it would explain some of research - why the phenomenon can persist even without the noise (eg in deaf people), why context matters so much, why it’s worse with close friends and family (you’ve already told them you have misophonia, so insofar as their continued noise indicates they don’t care about you enough to stop, it’s easier to be sad and angry about them).

We also suddenly recognise that we have mild versions of a condition, something that has always been an inconvenience and irritation, but fairly easy to work around.  Sometimes knowing this suggests a solution, sometimes nothing seems to help despite our improved understanding.

Hoboes

 Don't Call Them Bums: The Unsung History of America's Hard-Working Hoboes.

The other is a fantasy about living free on the fringes society: jumping boxcars despite the danger, wandering from town to town with no roots or commitments, sleeping under the stars with fellow hoboes who trade banjo tunes and wild stories. Woody Guthrie, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, James Michener, Louis L’Amour, Clark Gable, and multi-millionaire Winthrop Rockefeller were all drawn to this untethered lifestyle and told stories about their time on the rails, burnishing the legend.

Okay Woody Guthrie and Jack London I knew, and Louis L'Amour makes sense, but Winthrop Rockerfeller?  Didn't know that. 

I had a coworker who believed he was going to become a hobo when he retired.  Late 60s, bad back, I'm not sure this is going to work out like he thinks.  I would say "No harm in taking a shot at it," but actually, harm is possible with this guy.  He was not known for the best judgement in dealing with others.

Hares on the Mountain

Just to break things up.

A song which has taken on greater meaning as I age.

 

Sperm Racing

Once one sees the title of the article, how can one not post it? Sperm Racing. And yes, they are going to be taking bets.

how the race works:

    we’ve designed a microscopic racetrack that mimics the reproductive system—chemical signals, fluid dynamics, synchronized starts.
    high-resolution cameras track every microscopic move. it’s all live-streamed, complete with stats, leaderboards, and instant replays.
    the winner? the sperm that crosses the finish line first, verified by advanced imaging. and for those betting? the stakes have never been smaller—or bigger.

and yeah, it’s exactly as wild as it sounds. but we didn’t stop there.

we’re turning it into a spectacle. think press conferences. weigh-ins. live-streamed races with play-by-play commentary. and, of course, betting.

There is a scientific motivation (or excuse) behind it all, related to increasing fertility.

White Interests

Should Whites Pursue "White Interests?" by Noah Carl, at Aporia.  I react badly to even the title, and think the answer rather obvious.  However, as it is apparently not obvious to some growing fraction of Americans (or so it is claimed), perhaps it is good to connect to an essay on the subject. After describing what goes into non-white identity interests, Carl continues the thought:

I am opposed to all of the measures listed above. However, this doesn’t mean I’m in favour of white identity politics—it simply means I’m against non-white identity politics. If we’re using language consistently, then white identity must mean something quite different from “classical liberalism plus immigration restrictionism”. It must mean demanding special privileges for whites. And that’s something to which I’m also opposed.

The Problem of Susan

I have written about the Problem of Susan in Narnia many times here, and James has written on his own site and commented here as well. But as I head off to Pub Night tonight, I realise that I have linked to one of the member's websites websites a couple of years ago, but have never put up his take on "The Problem of Susan." He had sent it again in another context last week, and I went back and recognised it immediately as I read.  He has some drily humorous phrases in which I can hear his real-life voice. 

Part of his motive may simply have been to make up the right number for "the Seven Friends of Narnia." He had the four Pevensie children from Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe, he had Jill and Eustace from Dawn Treader and Silver Chair, and he had Digory and Polly from Magician's Nephew. Eight. Someone is superfluous to requirements. Lucy, Peter, and Polly never put a foot wrong, or only momentarily; Edmund, Digory, Eustace, and Jill are repentant sinners who have graduated to hero; that leaves Susan. (Bolding mine.) 

This is classic Earl Wajenberg speech. It's also a good essay, because he notices things. Enjoy.

Just-So Stories

The DCIDE Framework published in Biological Reviews by Adam Hunt and Adrian Jaeggi.

Since the first night I stumbled upon evolutionary psychiatry, with a background in philosophy of science, I saw a major problem: how can you prove or decide between any of the (many) evolutionary hypotheses of a particular disorder?

Yes, exactly. The just-so stories abound in psychology, especially evo psych. "Mania developed because in times of emergency a) being able to stay awake for hours was adaptive, b) the added charisma of hypomania is useful for leadership, c) overconfidence works sometimes, d) all of the above, plus six others." We like stories.  They help us understand and remember important ideas. Yet sometimes they are entertaining but wrong. 

Hunt and Jaeggi have designed a standard for evaluating the explanations, then they try it out on a recognised condition that has fuzzy edges, definitional problems, and unclear etiology, in this case autism (which is how I got interested).  So they are not going for the low-hanging fruit here, they are trying to figure out a difficult and contentious issue.

Basically, the systemising niche hypothesis states that autistic traits are ‘specialised minds’ (see mine and @ajaeggi other paper). Cognitive strengths and weaknesses balance out, with autistic traits advantageous in a proportion of the population because of their benefits to systemising, but don’t spread universally because they have costs.  

The by-product hypothesis, on the other hand, points to intelligence in the whole human species as the advantage: autistic traits are harmful overshoots which are exaggerated versions of ‘perceptual’ intelligence. This doesn’t imply autistic traits were somehow selected for strength/weakness profiles.

 

Sabine on Climate - and Honesty

This is into the realm where I can't check the work of either side very skillfully. Thus I rely on a metric I am usually a good judge of: who is fighting fair.

 

Golden Gate Quartet

 

The Worst People

Now that I am not directly fed on news I am hearing more of how people talk about it.  The standard wisdom for understanding your opponents' POV in a fair way is to listen to their best exponents make their case.  I can't say I have always done that, but I have put in some effort in that direction.  Yet I wonder if my irritation at their worst exponents has been more of a driver of my opinions, or at least my energy.

Once that occurred to me I started to notice that this seems to be what drives 'most everyone else as well.  They don't focus on their opponents' best people, they are snagged by their worst every time, like a fish to a lure. In the other direction, they regard their best expositers and ignore their own jerks.  This is know, but the standard wisdom may not fix this.

If you want to understand how those idiots on the other side can possibly think the stupid things they do, don't try and read their best folks, as sensible as it sounds.  Read a steady diet of the worst people on your side for about a week, the bigoted, the foolish, the pigheaded.

Because that's who your opponents are basing their opinion of your side on - your worst.

It's fairly painful.

Another World Record

It's been fun to catch up with this again.  I usually don't get as excited about indoor.  But the American middle distance crew is first class. Lots of records will fall this year.

 

Strategy

I'm going to try fixing things around the house next. 

Each project is satisfying and relaxing, but one keeps adding more projects along the way that it may be a net loss in terms of anxiety.

Grim goes for long motorcycle rides, Bird Dog goes out onto salt water, a few of you seem to cook (and bake) or tinker. Bsking researches things and looks at stats. I already walk a fair bit, and the weather is improving...

YouTube is pretty mindless. That looks promising. 

Update: Extra long walk.  The old reliable.

The News Is Relaxing

In my last semester at William and Mary I arrived at a patch where I fervently wished my mind would just stop for ten minutes, I was so tired of the busyness. Final projects, no job nor new idea for a career even though I was engaged, a final dwindling of my saved money...I did not take up either alcohol or weed, somehow - perhaps because I knew graduation was not going to happen unless I worked my way out of all the corners I had backed myself into.  If I had, I wonder if I would have been able to easily stop. 

And still, new ideas flooding in, asking to be written up or discussed. 

Anything that takes up the whole focus without much engaging the intellect is relaxing for us. People throw themselves into their work to forget grief, take up substances that make us temporarily stupid. We choose hobbies that are different from our vocations.  The best relaxation is a change of work and all that. Pornography may be stimulating, but the last thing it requires is any thought. Exercise is bad for your health, but it is relaxing.

So I gave up news for Lent and I have been flooded. It's like 1974-75 all over again.  I yearn for the relaxation of the news. I don't really have to think hard, just get creative in how I put my hackneyed, derivative ideas.  Certainly I find different angles and seek to be both entertaining and intellectually stimulating, but that is almost low-level automatic pilot for me. Not much hard thinking.

Because... it's hard. And now I am thrown back onto hard thinking again and it is just wearying. I'm soaking up twice the information and spitting it back out. Thirty hours ago I told you I had ten incomplete posts. Since then I have put up nine posts plus two that are just music to break things up. (Though I usually have to comment about those as well.) I'm trying to give you a rest. This will be the tenth eleventh and I have three more still unfinished.  I can't take off enough cafeteria dishes to get to the bottom.

 

Trump anti-Trump. Cast of arguing characters over at Maggie's, and nothing impresses more than the sameness of it all.   It's just easier, when reading the news, to allow yourself to be triggered and launch immediately into what chuckleheads those other guys are.  Look at this stupid, trite argument.  Haven't you been listening to what I've been saying all these years?* Do I have to pull this car over?** Rob Henderson linked to a piece about men with more gay genes having more sex with women (up to a point) and the comment section is taken up with people claiming there are no gay genes, outraged that it could even be suggested. FB commenting is a form of "news," but I see the name - and that it's a meme rather than a grandchild - and I know what they are going to say. THE DEMOCRATS ARE EVIL...LOOK AT WHAT TRUMP HAS DONE NOW...Holding rumors aloft in triumph. Elections only seem to change who gets to be outraged for four years and who gets to be smug.

It's like talking about the weather when you know more than most people about meteorology.  You sound smart, but it's just the weather.  My advanced studies lunch group again. .. Smartest people in the world, all 99th percentile. Not one of us is rising above cliche when talking about the news, the elections, and cultural commentary. 

I'd go have a few drinks but I gave up alcohol too. Sports?  Usually a reliable brain-number. But the Celtics are certainly going to finish with the third best record and we are only 80% through the season.  W&M came close again but is out of March Madness. Cooper Flagg is injured. I don't care about anything else.  I'll have to see what is going on in Track and Field, but this is usually a dead time.

My mind craves the relaxation of having headlines generate clever people talking, so that I can pretend I am intellectually stimulated when it's only my group's social status being threatened. "Aggh!  Those other ants are taking our mash!  We shall have nothing!"

*This is particularly painful when reprising things I wrote fifteen years ago and being rather pleased at having made the same points then.

**"Do I Have To Pull This Car Over?" was a finalist for the name of this blog.

World Record

Boring race.  History being made. Very relaxing. I can't think of anything smart to say.

 

Elon

A general observation, prompted by the last few weeks but not tied to them. (Stolen, BTW)

Elon Musk wants to go home to Mars.  He doesn't do Norman Rockwell.

Ivy League Hoop Jumpers

Razib and Charle Murray were just making observations to each other, both felt that scholars now tend to underperform in great deeds compared to scholars they had known when younger.  They attributed this to the additional factor of hoop-jumping which is now included in the mix.  Once there is a system, people can game it.  The system of old boys' network plus meritocracy admits lasted until the 60s, at which point meritocracy asserted itself in Ivy League schools (and Little Ivies, Seven Sisters, Ivy Wannabees, etc) more fully, though never entirely.  

Yet as soon as the combination of intelligence, extra points for parentage, creative spark, or special talent was in place, hoop jumping started creeping in. It is deeply related to conscientiousness, which is also valuable and perhaps the positive virtue of which gaming is the imitation. You still had to have the previous entrance characteristics, but when you add in conscientiousness/hoop-jumping/imitating intelligence as a criterion, the cutoffs for intelligence and talent must necessarily take a hit. 

They know the hidden rules better than you do.  They can smell them.

And we haven't even gotten to affirmative action yet.

A Calling-On Song

 We used to sing this in the car, in parts.

The Coming of Light

By chance, if chance you call it, our Tuesday group was at the moment in Season 2 of "The Chosen" where Mary Magdalen has been reinhabited by a demon and has gone into Jericho.  Simon and Matthew are dispatched to find her. Matthew has been learning Scripture from Mary and has just learned the verse from Psalm 139 "      Jesus reminds him of it as he leaves.

On Wednesday at the last of my classes on The Two Towers we discussed the obedience of Sam.  The pertinent sections are Book 4 Chapter VIII, Section 7 near the end of the chapter, beginning "In a dark crevice..." until the return of Gollum; then Chapter IX Sections 1-3, until Shelob backs off. The key paragraphs:

Then as he stood, darkness about him and a blackness of despair and anger in his heart. it seemed to him that he saw a light: a light in his mind, almost unbearably bright at first, as a sun-ray to the eyes of one long hidden in a windowless pit. Then the light became colour: green, gold, silver, white. Far off, as in a little picture drawn by elven-fingers he saw the Lady Galadriel standing on the grass in Lórien, and gifts were in her hands. And you, Ring-bearer, he heard her say, remote but clear, for you I have prepared this.

The bubbling hiss drew nearer, and there was a creaking as of some great jointed thing that moved with slow purpose in the dark. A reek came on before it. 'Master, master!' cried Sam, and the life and urgency came back into his voice. 'The Lady's gift! The star-glass! A light to you in dark places, she said it was to be. The star-glass!'

'The star-glass?' muttered Frodo, as one answering out of sleep, hardly comprehending. 'Why yes! Why had I forgotten it? A light when all other lights go out! And now indeed light alone can help us.'

Slowly his hand went to his bosom, and slowly he held aloft the Phial of Galadriel. For a moment it glimmered, faint as a rising star struggling in heavy earthward mists, and then as its power waxed, and hope grew in Frodo's mind, it began to burn, and kindled to a silver flame, a minute heart of dazzling light, as though Eärendil had himself come down from the high sunset paths with the last Silmaril upon his brow. The darkness receded from it until it seemed to shine in the centre of a globe of airy crystal, and the hand that held it sparkled with white fire.

Frodo gazed in wonder at this marvellous gift that he had so long carried, not guessing its full worth and potency. Seldom had he remembered it on the road, until they came to Morgul Vale, and never had he used it for fear of its revealing light. Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima! he cried, and knew not what he had spoken; for it seemed that another voice spoke through his, clear, untroubled by the foul air of the pit.

The background to that is from The Fellowship of the Ring, in Lorien, where Galadriel says

'And you, Ring-bearer,' she said, turning to Frodo. `I come to you last who are not last in my thoughts. For you I have prepared this.' She held up a small crystal phial: it glittered as she moved it, and rays of white light sprang from her hand. 'In this phial,' she said, 'is caught the light of Eärendil's star, set amid the waters of my fountain. It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out. Remember Galadriel and her Mirror! '

She had previously said, in the conversation at her Mirror

"I know what it was that you last saw,’ she said; `for that is also in my mind. Do not be afraid! But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against its Enemy. I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!’

There are Scripture parallels all over, from Genesis 1 and 1John 1 in particular.  But an interesting parallel occurs in John 1:1-5, in the prologue about light. v.5 - 5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.  Tolkien has a remarkable way of bringing in Scriptural ideas as a concept without forcing it through the door.  We invite the idea in and it sits in the living room and chats with us as if it were an old friend.  I suppose it is an old friend.

 

Lewis and White

The Great Books selection for this week was Charlotte's Web by EB White.  I directed a production of it in college and have always been particularly fond of Templeton the rat. When I heard that White had been born in 1899, I noted that he was nearly an exact contemporary of Lewis, who also wrote books for adults that could be understood by children.  I think the best books for children tend to be those in which the author is crafting an adult story for younger sensibilities.

For Charlotte's Web is about the seasonality of time and how Father Time and Mother Nature are joined. Birth and death leapfrog each other eternally.  It is about friendship changing as we age - it is Avery who helps Charlotte at the fair.  Fern has gone off with some boy - also part of birth and death.  Wilbur loves Charlotte's new descendants every year, but none ever quite matches up to their ancestor.

There is a cheerful paganism all over it, which farmers may gravitate to naturally. Yet here is the difference between White and Lewis in this: Nature is not the deeper reality, with Christianity as one of its superficial and spiritual representations. Christianity is the deeper truth, with Nature as one of its representations. White got the association right (this from his other writings more than here), but he has the arrow of causality wrong. "Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time." Whether Time is an attribute of Nature or Nature of Time I cannot tell you, for they occur together in our experience.

Jokes

Jokes are also a stew, like stories.  JRR Tolkien likened stories to a soup in a cauldron in his essay "On Fairy Stories." Odd bits bubble up, still recognisable from when they were thrown in last night or last millennium even though much of them has become part of the broth. I'm not sure you can get worship without some pagan elements thrown in - not tasty worship anyway.

Jokes and humor in general are similar, as we keep returning to the same elements.  Henpecked husbands, misunderstood directions, the downtrodden turning the tables, dumb-and-dumber - there are dozens of reappearing topics. I was taught in undergraduate theater that people will laugh at food, sex, and money jokes. Moliere is still funny.  I still recall Tom Spivey butchering the line "He is trying to seduce my daughter and steal my money" into "He is trying to steal my daughter and seduce my money," which the director insisted he switch to for the remainder of the production.  "If Moliere had thought of it, he would have written it that way the first time." 

Yet more than story, humor needs fresh ingredients to go in the broth.  Mark Twain is funny, but much of it falls flat now. There are jokes in Plautus that are still used (the one about palm-reading, for example) but not in the same form. A theater owner in NYC who has silent movie slapstick nights finds that Charlie Chaplin is the only one people find funny now. My father loved Ben Blue.

 You can see why it's supposed to be funny, where the laffs go. But who would even smile now? Yet that leads directly to this, which I find marvelous.  I wonder what my granddaughters think.

 

"Homeopathy For Right-Wingers"

In the episode on seed oils, The Studies Show claims that while ultra-processed foods are left-coded - because industrial foods are advertised and dangerous slop fed to us to make evil industries rich, the seed oils are right-coded - because this feminised society, including the government, want to steer young men away from manly foods when they should be out hunting and sunning their testicles or whatever. Both sides believe the naturalistic fallacy that foods were better 100 or 1000 or 10,000 years ago.  Both groups want you to move back to the land and grind your own wheat.

 Or as Melissa Chen says, Beef tallow is just right-wing coconut oil.

If RFK had run on the platform of making McDonald's fries taste as good as the used to, he might have done better.  

The summary of their examination of the claims is about the same as it was about ultra-processed foods.  There are definitional problems and little evidence. Of the few studies that point against seed oils, most are poorly designed, and the remaining one or two are drowned out by the many good studies showing the opposite. The old conventional wisdom turns out to be true. Saturated fats such as meats are slightly worse for you than polyunsaturated fats which are seed oils. And for you carnivores, relax in knowing that the saturated versions are only a little worse.

A Cup of Coffee, A Sandwich, and You

 I believe the title is supposed to echo the phrase "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou," from the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam, which was popular at the time.

 

Two Babies

This goes with my recent post of CS Lewis describing a Mystical Limpet. It is also reminiscent of Flatland.

In a mother's womb there were two babies, and one says to the other and says "Do you believe in life after delivery?" 

And the other says "But of course there has to be something after delivery. Maybe we're here to prepare ourselves for what will be later."

"Nonsense," said the first "there's no life after delivery. What kind of life would that even be?" 

"I don't know.  But there'll be more light than here. Maybe we'll walk with these legs and eat with our mouths. Maybe we'll have other senses we can't understand now."

"That's ridiculous. Walk with our legs is impossible and eating with our mouths is absurd. The umbilical cord is what supplies our nutrition and all of our needs according to the best science. But it's too short for walking around. Therefore life after delivery is logically excluded."

"What if it's just different than it is here? Maybe we won't need that physical cord anymore."

"Okay, if there were life after delivery, why has no one come back from there to tell us about it? Delivery is the end of life, and after delivery is nothing but darkness - and silence - and oblivion.  It takes us nowhere." 

"But certainly we'll meet Mother! She'll take care of us."

"Mother?  You actually believe in Mother? If Mother exists, where is she now?"

"She's all around us. We are of her and it is in her that we live and move and have our being. Without her this world would not and could not exist."

"I don't see her.  It's only logical that she's not here."

"Sometimes when you are in silence and you really listen you can perceive her presence. You can hear her loving voice calling down from above. We're here to prepare ourselves for what will be later."

Executive Orders

We didn't start the fire...

 

Nor did Obama, actually.  It goes back a long way, with each president worse than the last, it seems.

 

When the Opposite is True

I find it exciting when researchers find that the data point in the opposite direction to what they expected. An Error Of Overperception?

Contrary to previous research, we actually found underperception of sexual interest – people in our studies had a preference for answering that the person was not interested. Moreover, women were overperceiving interest while men were underperceiving it – completely opposite to what we had predicted. 

 But don't get excited

That said, this bias rarely came into play, as participants in both studies were highly accurate at telling if a person was interested in them or not, even with the intentionally confusing behaviors used in Study 2.

So yes, they found the opposite of expectation, but not enough to matter.  It's the ancient rabbis again: "Perhaps the opposite is also true," which is also beloved of all Chesterton fans. I'm glad they published anyway. Research into sex and attraction sells pretty well, and it's why a lot of people go into the field to begin with.  Talking about sex while claiming to be an intellectual is a pretty good gig.

Of course, that finger points back at me, doesn't it? 

The logo for HBES is quite clever, BTW.

Pub Night

I invited people from my class two hours away to pub night, just on a lark. But a reminder to all of you, we meet at Ollie's in Manchester/Goffstown every Thursday at 7. It is traditionally all male, but any female reader of this blog who happens to be passing through should not stay away because of that.

We are not the Inklings, nor even first cousin to the Inklings.  But we might be second cousin to the Inklings.

Upcoming

I have ten posts started, largely because of good walking weather and lots of driving leading to many podcasts, and book groups/studies leading to lots of interesting input from others.  I am overflowing with incomplete thoughts, but I haven't forgotten you. 

So much for not having much to say because of fasting from the news.  Maybe it was the news that was relaxing all along, because only my emotions were troubled, while my intellect was understimulated. The news is easy, when you think about it.

Lots o' Graphs About School

 From ACX, What Happened to NAEP Scores?

Everyone want their theory about what happened to education during Covid to prove out. (What am I saying?  Have I gone mad?  Everyone has already decided their theory about education has proven out whatever the data is. Post hoc rationalisation is very powerful.) Covid certainly didn't help, but it looks like a decline with the same slope was already in play.  The states that had schools open more vs those which stayed closed do not show clear trends.  Exceptions abound.  There is discrepancy between what happened with the best student and the worst.  Except where there isn't any difference.  Alexander notes that the 2026 scores will be of 4th graders who did not miss any covid closing time at all, so it will be interesting what their numbers are.

Anyway, there are lots of graphs, and many of you like those.

Charles Murray, A Brilliant Observer as Usual

Interviewed on Unsupervised Learning

Nothing's going to happen to the Harvard, Princeton, Yales of the world. Okay. They are immune from any of these things. But the rest of the higher educational establishment is not. These are underway. They're going to accelerate. And at some point... Maybe the private sector will realize the degree to which the only thing that they care about with the college degree is its value as a signal. And insofar as the signal has gotten really noisy, the fact that you hold a BA in history from a good school no longer tells you very much about that person of That signal has gotten so noisy that it may be that employers in the private sector are going to say, what we really need is a good measure of general intelligence and a good measure of conscientiousness and openness. And if I know those things about an applicant, if I'm not talking about STEM, basically, that's all I need. The college degree no longer is telling me much of anything. That kind of change is going to undercut an awful lot of what's driven college enrollment figures for the last several years.

I worry about the fine smaller schools, often religious schools who are hoping that the alligator eats them last.

Far-UVC

No, I didn't know what it is either. Flipping the Switch on Far-UVC by Richard Williamson guesting at the Works in Progress Newsletter, which reports on biotech, replicability and fraud, and the intersection of tech and social problems. 

Well, that got my attention.  Is there another side to this story I don't know about?  There was a specific link to research on the air in night clubs, which go out of business quickly under any kind of restriction, and I would think that restaurants and indoor arenas would want to be on this as well.  The article, admittedly by someone from a nonprofit that is advocating for this, describes some of the reasons why this can't get off the ground.

Opinions welcome, as always.  Informed opinions even more.

2010 Links

Topics I still consider important. 

Well-Meaning Opposition. A favorite soapbox, of people believing they understand the (evil) motives of others and how divisive this is in political discussion. Amazon doesn't sell any Motiv-o-meters.

Why Charter Schools fail the test. If you disagree, remember that you aren't arguing with me, but with Charles Murray.  Schools matter at the margins.  We put a lot of arguing energy into school and style differences that don't leave any measurable trace behind. Since writing this post I have refined that to believing that schools and teachers matter more for the worst students than the middle or best.  This is because if one is near the bottom, the either-or is much more stark. Graduation versus dropping out. Learning to suck it up and get at least something done to meet your goal rather than throwing in the towel. Not coming stoned to school. Much of life is random, or at least not programmable in advance by parents, schools, or churches. There might be Providence, but the schools aren't affecting that much.

 Stimulus Dollars - Just another example of the individuality of decisions when working with the mentally ill. You just hope you are right, or right enough.

A Man of the People

Well I didn't even need to click on the link, except to pick up the url.  It was right there on the sidebar, from Althouse. "Ambitious Democrats Have a New Game Plan: Yak It Up About Sports/Prominent leaders are flocking to sports radio shows and podcasts, an early sign of how the party is trying to reach apolitical young men...." 

It's news, and I shouldn't even be taking a chef's taste of it, but I had two thoughts: Second, how are the female candidates going to take this?  The female voters will be okay with the guys-being-guys approach - unless they deeply support a disadvantaged female candidate - but how are the female governors and women of the Senate going to feel?

And my first thought was unfair.

Diplomacy

Also mentioned in class by another this morning, is that diplomacy is the art of making everyone equally unhappy.  My mind still goes to the news instead of keeping my fast, so I will just leave that out there for general application.

Envy

In the discussion of Envy this morning in class, it occurred to me that much of our life is given to us by God, and we can either accept this and marry that life, or go off seeking someone else's life, which has an element of coveting someone else's spouse.

When we marry our assigned lives, we vow to to be faithful to the life for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, so long as we both shall live.

Update:  I said discussion and class.  Neither are true.  It was during the sermon and I was listening to one person.

Man With a Plan

Where is Fred when we need him?  He ran for congress in Vermont after he retired because he needed the money and it was a good-payin' job that didn't require any experience. 

He did pretty well, considering. The video is 90 minutes, but you can pick it up pretty quickly.

DEI

 

Different Drum

I don't know how long it took me to figure out that this song must have been written by a man, though its most famous version was sung by Linda Ronstadt. It fits the male stereotype of the time* - in fact of all recent times until just after this was popular.  Women trying to secure promises and commitments from men and men trying to elude them was a common theme of novels, plays, and folk songs.

Yes, and I ain't sayin' you ain't pretty

All I'm sayin' 's I'm not ready

For any person, place, or thing to try and pull the reins in on me 

So yeah, it was a man who wrote it. Michael Nesmith, later of the Monkees, in 1964.

 *I was on the other end of that spectrum in the 70s, actively seeking serious relationships, but choosing girls who went on to marry late or never. They were ahead of their time, I suppose, but I was rescued by Tracy, who found some reason to accept my suit.

Johnny Cash

I received Cash's American VI: Ain't No Grave for my birthday years ago, and it still haunts me. I don't know how I would rate it. It exists on a different scale, from Weak to Powerful, on which it would get five stars. But on the scale of Bad to Good, maybe not so well.

Someone who didn't know the story of Johnny Cash, a younger person who hadn't seen the movie or didn't know his history, would be amazed that an album this bad could be made and sell copies. Cash, who recorded most of these songs shortly before his death in 2003, had almost no voice left, little energy. His range of interpreting songs, his last remaining strength, was greatly constricted.

But what he does with those last remaining talents is so gripping that I nearly drove off the road twice on the way to work, my distraction was so great. His ability to take a shallow song and inject depth into it forever, which he did increasingly over the last 20 years of his career, reach their pinnacle here. I had always found "For The Good Times" to be the first example of country music's glorification of the tawdry.

Don't look so sad
I know it's over
But life goes on
And this old world
Will keep on turning
Let's just be glad
We had some time to spend together
There's no need to watch the bridges
That we're burning

Lay your head,
Upon my pillow
Hold your warm and tender body
Close to mine...

But Cash sings it from his deathbed, with June Carter Cash unnamed but present. "Hold your warm and tender body close to mine" has an entirely different meaning when stripped of its cheap sexuality. It is from a husband with damaged lungs to a wife who has seen the worst of him and is herself dying. The abuse, the amphetamines and infidelities, the helpless devotion, are just beneath the surface. The song is changed forever. It is a resurrection.

Something similar came out in their "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" duet on American IV - his stark voice, her unusual harmony in a voice weak but clear.

"Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream" is similarly redeemed. Since the 1950's it has been little more than a reality-challenged peacenik song, sung by wise-seeming 30-year-olds for 20-year-olds, an earlier "Imagine" with a worse bass-line.

I dreamed I saw a mighty room
Filled with women and men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again

And when the paper was all signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads
And grateful pray'rs were prayed...

No longer a starry-eyed hippie anthem, but the reflection of an old man with no illusions about humanity, reciting the dream once again as a reminder.

The whole album has deeply Christian humility and defiant resurrection threading it together, though less than half the songs are Christian. "Ain't No Grave" is an old Pentecostal Holiness song that runs deeper than the camp meeting and the sawdust trail, back into an Appalachian revivalism barely above the pagan, but more profound for that primitiveness.

The album has no real liner notes, just some B&W photos and the list of songs. The arrangements and accompaniment are impossibly understated, a simplicity that self-respecting studio musicians would never attempt these days. But this is the Man in Black, who now signs himself John R. Cash with a shaky scrawl. There's no other way to do these songs.

Pick something.  There's plenty.

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State

I commented on this book in 2010.  I think his book and my comments are still correct, but less so now.

Andrew Gelman's book has a good deal of useful information. Neglecting some important questions reduces its value.

There is a reminder that all states are purple, and even in states we think of strongly one way or another, it's a 60-40 split. This isn't new - in fact, it should be obvious to anyone who stops and thinks about it a few minutes - but it can't be said often enough. We like our data packed into economical packets, so we are attracted to the largest simplifications we still find satisfying, but these mislead. One of the most intelligent people I know commented with rolled eyes about a trip to Tennessee, and what an obviously red state it was, with its guns, confederate flags, churches with big message signboards, and pro-America bumper stickers. Problem is, Tennessee isn't that red - and she was in the bluest section of it. Good chance those were Democrats in those pickups.

Of considerable interest in thinking about voting preferences and relative, rather than absolute wealth, Gelman notes that the richest states tend to vote Democratic, but the wealthier voters within each state tend to vote Republican. Similarly, in the blue states the poor have higher church attendance - in red states, the wealthier attend. That's a bit more nuanced, a little less predictable, than we are used to describing. These sorts of odd breakdowns, not shocking but not quite what we thought, make up the bulk of the book. If you like that sort of thing, Gelman's got plenty.

Two things left me mistrusting some of his conclusions. He does not break down the voting patterns of the poor into black and nonblack (or white and nonwhite, if you prefer). I get that he is trying to show voting tendencies in terms of purely economic considerations, and racial data would be a complicating factor. But it is likely an important complicating factor. Remember that these voting tendencies are much like the purple states. If 60% of a group votes a certain way that is comparatively significant because in the American context, that's a big split. (Compare to say, Romania, where the UMDR receives almost no votes from ethnic Romanians - it's a Hungarian party.) If African-Americans are disproportionately represented among the poor, and they vote 90% Democratic, that can create a false picture that some trends are economic when they are in fact racial. Perhaps the tendencies Gelman reports hold up even if this adjustment is made, but they would at minimum be far less robust.

Secondly, the Democratic Party is a coalition of groups, far more so than the Republican Party. Thus, popular generalizations about Democratic voters which Gelman debunks might in fact be strongly true about one or more members of the coalition. He is at pains to illustrate that stereotypes about Democrats as wealthy latte-drinking liberals are not true. I believe the numbers he puts before us, showing that Democrats do not dominate among the wealthy, are true. But the Pew research category of liberals, which makes up 19% of the US (and therefore well more than a third of the Democratic Party) are indeed much wealthier than the other groups. I don't have the data on latte, but the stereotype he purports to debunk is in fact true - but only for a large but definable portion of Democrats, not the party as a whole.

Just for sake of guessing, Gelman's misunderstanding of some conservative ideas tells me he is not one. He does not come off as especially liberal, however, and may be an honest broker - a commodity in short supply these days.

Expectations

Texan99 and others have noted that many of the federal workers who have been dismissed or laid off are expressing an unusual amount of outrage, as if their jobs were supposed to be untouchable, a given in the world unless they screwed up on a personal level. I commented there, and for that side of the story it might be better if you also commented there rather than here, as that conversation has already started. But that is too connected to the news, currently outside my remit.  

I think the spiritual aspect of what we expect is more interesting at the moment anyway.  What people come to expect, they grow to feel they deserve.  We deserve not to have an accident or traffic jam detain us on the way to work.  It is unfair when the supermarket is out of our type of tomatoes. There is always enough snow our vacation week at the resort, but this year we were cheated somehow. Our flights are delayed, the lights were against us when we were in a hurry, the phones should work.

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tete-а-tete with the friend), that throw him out of gear... They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. (CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters Chap XXI)

Perhaps related: The more you give people the less grateful they are.

International House of Prayer

A post about the consequences of not wanting to hurt someone's feelings.  I am usually guilty of the opposite sin, of "saying the quiet part out loud" or blundering into an offense.  But this time...

Mo. police, fire chaplains dismissed in fallout from church sexual abuse investigation

We have good friends whose children became deeply involved with this ministry, traveling to Kansas City for events, and the daughter and her husband ended up working for them.  They still do, I believe, though they are in a distant city and are now sheltering some of the victims who spoke out. 

I didn't like the group from the start, mostly for doctrinal reasons concerning their approach to prophecy and their own centrality to the coming Last Days. Teenagers influenced by them prophesied over each other what their careers should be and dangers that were about to happen to them. There was a youth group in town where such things were common. This is exactly the sort of cultish behavior that is so often connected with financial and sexual scandals, including threats during the coverups.

But I said nothing because I feared their parents would think I was criticising their judgement and discernment by letting, even encouraging their children to travel and participate.  Nor did I want to hurt the teenager/young adult feelings, because I had known these children from birth and am fond of them as well. We were at their weddings, they were at our yearly Jesse Tree celebration, they were very welcoming to our two boys when they arrived from Romania. The son has long since left the faith.

They are adults and their decisions are their own, certainly. Yet I wish I had not refrained from putting in my oar for fear of offending.  20/20 hindsight, surely.

The Man Born To Be King

Someone on a Wade Center podcast I listened to last year said that some people use Dorothy Sayers' The Man Born To Be King as an Advent devotion some years. Listening to it, it is immediately clear that they meant a Lenten devotion, so my wife and I are listening to it 3-4 nights per week.  It can be read at archive.org at The Man Born to be King.  CS Lewis read it every Holy Week for the last twenty years of his life, greatly approving of the down-to-earth quality, the contemporary language, and the informality. It was a weekly radio play beginning late 1941 on the BBC and repeated on radio a half-dozen times.

It was controversial at the time, because many people in Britain thought anything from the Bible had to be quite Authorized Version in its tone, so her townspeople with Irish or Northern or City accents were right out. There were homely details of a woman inviting Jesus to dinner after the baptism and remembering him as a boy and young man, or children singing scraps of songs.  We would consider such things normal in our day, and in fact this broadcast seems to our ears too stilted, too residually formal.  The music and sound effects are from another era when such things were less subtle.

But it's good, very good, and I think it will bear reading or listening. I mentioned recently that I had some concern about The Chosen, good as it is,  because people will begin to mix up the scripture with the artistic license.  There is no such danger here, I don't think, though there may have been in its own day.

God Out Loud

In discussing the mystery of the Trinity in Adult Sunday School years ago, we followed the thought that reading silently to oneself was uncommon in history until quite recently, and thus the believer’s experience of scripture, lessons, and discussion about God was quite different. God was known out loud, most often in a group. Jesus didn’t carry scrolls around, nor did he sit and contemplate them a long time and then speak extemporaneously when they handed Him one at synagogue. Talmud was written in the form of a conversation about the text, and Torah was discussed. Paul Saenger has an academic book brought out by Stanford University Press Space Between Words tracing how differences in writing slowly changed reading from oral to silent. When Augustine read silently to himself, people wondered whether he was just faking, and whether it “counted” as having read the text, the effective reverse of modern debate debate whether listening to audible books constitutes reading them or not.

Reading silently, then, drove the development of printing as much as printing encouraged the spread of silent reading. An interesting history and thought discussion, of course, but I am more concerned here with the effect this has had on faith and the experience of God. Literacy increased, and even participatory hymns became poetic and complicated. By the late 1900s culture,  we were at the extreme of this perception of God as something that happens on the page and in our heads, so it is not surprising that bibliolatry and gnostic abstraction were among the particular heresies Americans have been prone to. As one who does not partake in most religious media, neither music, nor film, radio, TV, conferences – I think I am on the outer edge of silence even in that culture. I do discuss a fair bit. I attend services. I read. But there is clearly a danger for me of experiencing God mostly in my own head.

It is very Protestant, an uber-Protestant personal faith that sees its expression in both the evangelical and pietist Quiet Time/ Meditation/ Sola Scriptura branches of the faith, and the academic and seminary portions of all our denominations. It is isolating one part of the faith, often necessarily and with powerful effect. But it would be a foreign and dry faith to the huge majority of those who have carried the name of Christ – and most Jews, frankly.  

This is changing back to the more visual, auditory, multisensory experience of God.

Saying things out loud gives them a reality they did not seem to have before, as anyone who has ever shared a personal secret knows. The faith was always much more concrete and physical in earlier ages, and still is in most places of the world. The kaleidoscope shifts a bit and the old elements look new.